Sunday, January 29, 2017

It
was a delight to see you and all the other seminarians from Bathsheba Bible
College at the annual retreat a few weeks ago. The retreat director struck me
as a little odd, but at least the pizza was good. Say hello to the brethren for
me. Back to the disquisition.

Let’s
talk a little about the perish, I mean the parish. A parish is a stable
community of the faithful within a particular church, the care of which is
entrusted to an ordained pastor under the authority of the diocesan bishop. It
is the primary unit of a diocese. In the Code of Canon Law, parishes are
discussed in cc. 515–552, “Parishes, Pastors, and Parochial Vicars.” The word
parish is derived from a Greek word that means “…the area around the house.” My
only perspective is that of a diocesan priest. I cannot comment on the
experience of religious order priests. The diocesan priesthood has changed
greatly during my short life, and I cannot predict where it will go. I can only
comment on where it has come from and how it has developed. People ask me,
“What order do you belong to?” I used to answer flippantly, “The order of St.
Peter.” I cannot do that anymore. There is now a group called the Priestly
Fraternity of St. Peter (FSSP), so that joke won’t work anymore, as if it ever
did.

What
I meant is that I am part of the original simple structure of the Catholic
Church. The essential structure of the Church is the parish. (Warning the next
few lines are speculation garnered from a lifetime of study. They may be
absolutely wrong.) I suspect that in the first century of the Christian era,
one town had one supervisor ("mebaqqer"
in Hebrew, "episkopos" in Greek, "bishop"
in English,) who was assisted by a few table waiter/helpers (“shamash” in Hebrew, "diakonos" in Greek, "deacon" in English.)His congregation was probably never more than
a couple hundred people.He was probably
called “Pappas” ("Father" in Greek) and
was a spiritual father to his small community. The bishop presided over the
Eucharist and approved new members of the community who were then instructed by
the deacons. He re-admitted the fallen back into fellowship after a time of
repentance and probably anointed the sick as well as preached.He was both supervisor of the faithful and
wise elder (“Zaken” in Hebrew, "presbyteros" in Greek, "priest" in
English.) When things got a bit too much, he might appoint tried and true
deacons as fellow elders, thought this would have been honorific. They could
preside at the Eucharist in the absence of the bishop, the main elder, but
could not admit others to holy orders and did have authority to re-admit the
fallen to the fellowship by means of penance. If a local church had more than
one house of assembly, that is a parish, in a given district, the bishop might
put that community in the care of a trusted presbyter and a deacon or two.

So,
there it was. You had a very simple structure: supervisor, assisted by table
waiters and elders.(Bishops, deacons
and priests in English) Each diocese was essentially autonomous in its
administration, though united to the wider Church by means of local synods of
bishops, and when a big doctrinal issue came up, they looked to the bishop of
Rome for instruction.Around 170 AD, St.
Irenaeus of Lyon, a Greek bishop of a French city, wrote, “…we do put to
confusion all those who…assemble in unauthorized meetings by indicating that
tradition derived from the apostles, of the very great, the very ancient, and
universally known Church founded and organized at Rome by the two most glorious
apostles, Peter and Paul. (It is) the faith… which comes down to our time by
means of the successions of the bishops. It is a matter of necessity that every
Church should agree with this Church… (Irenaeus of Lyon, Against Heresies, Book
III, Chapter 3)

Irenaeus
was born into a Christian family around 125 AD. His pastor (bishop) was St.
Polycarp who had been instructed by St. John. This means that one long lifetime
from Christ, one short generation from the Apostles, Christians in the little
Catholic Church already looked to Rome for theological guidance. This was not
much different from the church in which I was raised.There were no deacons anymore, but the pastor
was pretty much the bishop in his parish and was assisted by a few assistant
pastors. The church was the parish. The parish was the church.

The
parish was almost as much my home as was the house I grew up in. We played in
the church lot, went to the parish school, assisted at the Mass, went to parish
ice cream socials, dances, catechism classes, retreats, holy hours, and even
the occasional lecture. There were men’s clubs, ladies’ guilds, book
discussions, card parties and on and on. It was the parish, the village of our
souls. We didn’t have cable, nor had we IPads or IPods.We played baseball, went to Boy Scouts which
then was made up of people you knew and trusted. The pastor was scary. He never
smiled. He knew us very well, better than we wanted to be known. I suspect even
though he never smiled, he actually cared for each of us and knew us each by
name. You didn’t go to the next parish over because the pastor was crabby and
gave long sermons and longer penances after confession. The parish was home. If
you went to the next parish over, the pastor would send you right back to your
own home parish. There was no church hopping, just as there was no wife
swapping, at least as far as I knew. The churches of my youth were full. The
intimate community of believers that shepherded by the overseer/elder, heir to
the apostles was preserved in the simplicity and familiarity of the parish. The
parish was not incidental to the faith. It was the faith. This system worked
pretty well for almost two thousand years, and then something happened.

Sunday, January 22, 2017

For our struggle is not
against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities,
against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil
in the heavenly realms. (Ephesians 6:12)

As
a priest, you will be in constant danger of thinking that your struggle is against
the parish council, the finance committee and the diocesan bureaucracy. It is
not. Our struggle is against the devil. In his brilliant book, “The Screwtape Letters,” C.S. Lewis has
the devil calling human beings, “amphibians.” We live like frogs on the edge of
the pond. We, like the frogs, live in two worlds. They live in water and on the
land. We live in a spiritual realm and a physical realm. It is much easier to
live on the land, quite frankly. You can see what’s out there more easily and
travel becomes simply backward and forward sort of arrangement; whereas in the water,
vision may be obscured, and opportunities as well as dangers are much more
omni-directional.

So
it with us, especially us priests. The visible world is much easier to deal
with. The devil will try to convince us that the real work of the priesthood is
dealing with baptisms, weddings and funerals (called the hatch, match and
dispatch part of the business) we get the ceremonies done with as little hassle
as possible. It always amazes me that people will complain to the proper
authority, meaning the bishop if they were unhappy with your
“performance.”(I am not making this up.
A person, not a parishioner, not even a Catholic, used that exact word in a
letter to the bishop regarding a funeral I offered.) You will fight with
wedding planners who want the bride brought down the aisle in a chariot drawn
by llamas, and you will fight with the mother of the bride who wants the llamas
to remain in the sanctuary during the Mass.(This part I am making up, but not by much.)

Above
all, the devil will want you to believe that the most important thing you will
do is go to meetings. For some reason bureaucrats think that going to meetings
is real work. They will plan endless meetings that you will be expected to
attend. The devil will gradually convince you that there is nothing spiritual
about the priesthood, by having you forget that he even exists. Again, C. S. Lewis:

“There
are two equal and opposite errors into which our race can fall about the
devils. One is to disbelieve in their existence. The other is to believe, and
to feel an excessive and unhealthy interest in them. They themselves are
equally pleased by both errors and hail a materialist or a magician with the
same delight.”

You
will get some very strange people who think that everything is going bump in
the night. I remember a woman who was absolutely frantic about being attacked
by demon-possessed birds. They would charge at her windows and terrify her. I
explained that male birds will charge their own reflection during mating season
and that nothing supernatural was going on. She was not convinced.

On
the other hand, you will meet people who, when they see someone floating five
feet over a bed will insist that there is just a strong updraft in the room.
The middle position is the correct one. Part of the job of the priest is to be
a little skeptical about spiritual phenomena. A little skeptical, just a
little. We usually become so skeptical that if a miracle or a demon came up and
bit us in the ankle, we wouldn’t notice it.

That’s
just where the devil wants the clergy.He wants us firmly planted on our fundamental fundament, and never on
our knees. There is a saying, “Whom the devil cannot make bad he makes busy.” I
would change it slightly for the clergy, Whom the devil would make bad he would
first make busy.

I
am a lousy prayer. There is so much else I have to do. God is very patient.
When I come late to prayer, and spend only a little time, the Lord never gets
mad. On the other hand, the people who so want you to see things the way they
seem things will get very huffy if you are late for their event, or only spend
a little while at it. The Almighty usually gets the leftovers in my life,
because, oddly, the All Powerful never insists on having His own way – unlike
the head of the parish llama herding committee.

The
worst is the late-night party. People will invite you to an event that starts
at 8:00 PM. They will expect you to stay until midnight. No mind that you must
be up at 5:30 AM to be awake for a 6:30 AM Mass at which you will be expected
to preach a reasonably coherent, but very brief, sermon. They will say, “But
father, it’s only once in a blue moon.” For them maybe. For you it happens a
few times a week. There are birthdays, there are anniversaries, there is the
arrival of the Nouveau Beaujolais. Most people celebrate the great events in
the lives of ten or twenty people. You will have a family of thousands. That’s
at least three or four birthdays a day. They will expect you to get just a
little tipsy to help them celebrate the great event. That means you will need
treatment for alcohol or liver failure or maybe both in pretty short order.

Once
Jesus was asked, “What is the work of God?”Jesus answered, “The work of God is this: to believe in the one he has
sent.” (John 6:29) Remember that the Greek word in question is “pisteuein.” To believe in modern English
primarily means “to be of an opinion” the word in the text of scripture, “pisteuein” primarily means to trust. The
Christian’s first task is to trust Jesus.

How
do you learn to trust someone? By getting to know them. Time spent in the study
of Scripture and time spent on one’s knees before the Blessed Sacrament is the
great task of the priest. If you have no spiritual power, what can you give a
world ensnared by the devil? There is a great deal of talk these days about
accompanying the people. What good is my company, if Christ does not accompany
me? The great work of the priest is accomplished in prayer; and the world, the
flesh, and the devil will conspire to keep you from prayer, and for the most
part I go happily along with them, forgetting the incredible power that waits
for me in prayer.

Sunday, January 15, 2017

Alcohol
and the devil. An unfortunate, yet common combination. “How can you say that, father?Wine is mentioned frequently mentioned in the Bible. Jesus made wine at
Cana.Wine was used at the last supper
and is used at Mass.”

On the contrary, I am very fond of a nice glass of wine,
like a 1982 Chateau la Vieux Canard Gras 1982 or a Gewürztraminer. (I just
threw that in because it’s so much fun to say.) Alcohol consumption has changed
since our Savior was making the stuff out of water. In a word, distillation! The
ancients always watered their wine, unless they were out to have a good time
and subsequent headache. This is reflected by the custom of pouring a little
wine into the chalice, symbolizing the joining of humanity and divinity in the
person of Jesus. At the time of Christ anyone who drank wine un-watered was out
to get drunk. Even so, it takes a lot more work to get hammered on wine than on
distilled beverages.

The
earliest evidence of true distillation of alcohol comes from the School of Salerno in southern Italy
during the 12th century. The formula for making the stuff was written in secret
code. In 1437, brandy or “burned wine” is mentioned in the archives of
Katzelnbogen, Germany. The distillation process evaporates all the intoxicating
essence of wine and squeezes out anything that even resembles fruit. As the
saying goes, “Wine is fine, but liquor is quicker.” With distilled liquor one
can kill as many brain cells in a few minutes as it takes wine to obliterate in
perhaps an hour or so. One can go from sane to stupid in minutes with distilled
liquor, hence its popularity. Thomas Jefferson said that the country with
little wine has much drunkenness. He knew what he was talking about. The
founding fathers were huge consumers of booze, much to the chagrin of the
founding mothers one suspects. George Washington was the largest producer of
whiskey in the United States, producing 11,000 gallons in just the year 1799.
When the fifty-five founding fathers finished writing the U.S. Constitution,
they celebrated by drinking, putting away 54 bottles of Madeira, 60 bottles of
claret, eight bottles of whiskey, 22 bottles of port, eight bottles of hard
cider, 12 beers and seven bowls of alcoholic punch so large that, “ducks
could swim in them.” Said one participant, Americans drank hooch, not wine, and
this was true until recently. Watered wine with dinner is a lot different than
three or four Long Island Iced Teas.“What has this to do with religion?” well you may ask. Plenty.

We
Christians are all about freedom, because we are all about love. If one is
forced to love one cannot Love and we believe that God is love, stone sober
freely given sacrificial Love. Not the fake kind of “luv” that one encounters
on a moonless night in a dimly lit bar. True Love happens in the cold clear
light of morning. The devil knows this so he is going to want to get you into a
lot of dimly lit places. I have never been an exorcist, but I know people.There really is such a thing as demonic
possession. It’s rare though not as rare as it used to be. We give the devil a
lot more openings in the modern world than we used to.

I’ve heard that a possession is rather like when a thug has
invaded a home and has the owner tied up and gagged in the basement. A huge
element of exorcism is the attempt to get the possessed person to exercise his
own free will. The creed is very important as a tool against the devil. In
effect the sufferer is encouraged to make an act of the will say, “I trust in
one God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit.” The work of the exorcist is to help the
person possessed to get free. The devil accomplishes the same thing with sin
and addiction. He feasts on the will of another, as already mentioned above.

Addictions
(be they to alcohol, jealousy, hatreds we cherish, gossip, sex, pornography,
drugs, television shopping, pick your poison) are all useful to the devil in
snaring his dinner – you. Any sin, but particularly addiction, is part of his
hunting arsenal and you, father, are one of his favorite foods (though not as
tasty as a bishop, cardinal or pope). He also enjoys snaring a nun or a monk,
but he has already overfished those waters, so they are relatively a rare treat
for him. So, father, or father-yet-to-be, learn your limits. And by the way,
never drive under the influence. Even if you’ve just had a little – if it’s a little more
than the police like, the devil has you.

A few
years back, a truly holy man, a bishop was arrested for drunken driving. He had
been to dinner with his aged mother. It seems he was set up by a waiter with
whose political and social agenda this bishop did not agree. The waiter called
a policeman, a friend of like preferences who ambushed the bishop and his
mother. The breathalyzer said a little too much wine, the bishop was hauled in,
and the press made it seem like he had run over a litter of kittens on the way
back from a night of debauchery in Vegas. His ministry was trashed. The devil
couldn’t get his soul, but he could still cause plenty of harm. If you, father,
drink and drive, you are driving for a lot of people. You carry the diocesan
lawyers in the back seat because it’s the diocese that your victims if any will
sue. You carry your parishioners, who will be scandalized and grieved for you,
and more than that you carry Christ and his bride.

Scandal
is a dreadful thing and the people who hate the Lord and his beloved bride, the
Church are always looking for one. I don’t know if it’s still true, but when I
was young, if you were arrested – arrested, mind you, not convicted – of a DUI, you were
shipped off to that place I mentioned a while ago, the place where they send
priests who need to think about things for a bit. It meant good-bye to friends
for a while and probably to your parish permanently.

“Be sober, be
vigilant; because your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, prowls about,
seeking whom he may devour.” (1Pt 5:8)

Note, the first pope, Peter advises us to be SOBER. Why?
Because the devil is peckish and we make a tasty snack when served with sauce.

Rev. Know-it-all

About Me

Rev. Know-it-all is the alter ego of Fr. Richard Simon, Pastor of St. Lambert Parish, Skokie, IL.
Now a regular host of Relevant Radio's "Fr. Simon Says", Fr. Simon spent over 20 years "...teaching dead languages to comatose seminarians."
Credits: The Reverend Know-It-All is a parody of Mr. Know-It-All, the alter ego of Bullwinkle J. Moose, a carton character created by Jay Ward (1920-1989).